Monday, March 08, 2010

Conformance Test

I've been working on a conformance test for X-Plane. The idea is simple, and not at all mine: X-Plane 945 can output a series of test images that are the same on each run. The images cover a variety of rendering conditions. If a video driver is broken, the images will be corrupted.

You can learn more about how this works here: I am working on the 945 timedemo tarball now.

The main driver for this is to help NVidia, ATI, and Apple to integrate X-Plane into their dedicated testing. With X-Plane as part of their test systems, they can catch driver bugs the easy way - the day after the code is changed, rather than months later after a series of angry web posts. X-plane 945 includes a number of new features as part of its framerate test to help with this process.

My hope is that this will benefit users (who will see less bugs) and the driver writers (who can get feedback on code changes in a uniform and reproducible manner). Here are the eight images in the sample conformance test I wrote, based on the LOWI custom airport scenery.